


to the still earth say

by meritmut



Series: sifki au verse [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Gen, Imprisonment, Male-Female Friendship, Mother-Son Relationship, Platonic Female/Male Relationships, Redemption
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-24
Updated: 2012-10-26
Packaged: 2017-11-12 18:47:13
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 3,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/494471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some say the Goddess has three faces, but some say different. In his incarceration, She visits him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the maiden

She had been a sweet girl, in her own way. Sweet in the utter fragility of the mask she wore, and the resolute, determinedly arrogant innocence with which she held it together. It was as if, Loki thought, she had woven it from spider-silk, yet would have the world believe that it was ivory.

Centuries have passed since the day he took her hand and bid her sweep the mask aside, revealing to all the true and dazzlingly sharp mind beneath it, and a woman who is anything, _anything_ but sweet. Sigyn can be impossible at times, unkind and deliberately hurtful, but he knows her conduct towards him is only ever a mirror of his own towards her. If he is amiable then she is warm; if he is callous then she is cruel. It is the way they are.

Loki sees evidence of his friends' mourning when the Einherjar escort him through the citadel to be imprisoned. She stands with Sif, night and day incarnate, to one side of the great hall where all of Asgard seems to have gathered to witness his shame. Not in the place of honour stands she, as she would have done a year ago. There is no honour in being a traitor's friend.

Since his fall from grace Sigyn has lost much of her standing in the small court, that much is true. She has spent a thousand years revelling in being Loki's closest confidante, and her reputation suffered with his ruin. The latest flock of wittering hens to be accepted into Frigg's court cast her an occasional sideways glance, which she will return with a basilisk stare and a clenching of the hand that encloses Sif's. Sif for her part glares stonily ahead, seeing nothing and observing everything, a pent-up presence at her friend's side.

Some will have undoubtedly expected Sigyn to distance herself from the very memory of Loki, as any respectable maiden of Asgard should and especially one as uncommonly sharp as she. They would have recommended - had she asked, and she never did - that she repair to a quiet corner of Fensalir to reconsider her allegiances. It is not fitting that she should retain affection for him.

But while she may be many things that other maids have been before her - vain and proud, with a keen ear for gossip - and can be cunning and shrewd enough to match Loki himself at times, Sigyn has never been disloyal. Just as Sif had mourned Loki's fall in her own quiet, hidden way, and demonstrated only her anger towards him in public, so Sigyn had held back her tears and muttered hoarse prayers to the Móðir that he be returned to them, and held her head high when in company.

She visits him only once that first year, and her stay in the gaol is short. On slippered feet she descends from the guards' common room above, having bribed her way thus far, and glides right up to the warded bars that keep Loki captive. He hasn't been here long, and he still wears the jaw-crushing muzzle they forced between his teeth in Midgard: if she comes to speak, she'll get no answers.

But Sigyn is used to one-sided conversations with Loki. She has always been able to translate his silences into speech and now will be no different - if she could only get these thrice-curst tears out of her eyes.

Loki watches as his old friend's eyes brim sea-blue and overflow, as she lifts her doll-like hands to wrap them around the bars. The wards that keep him from spelling his way out have no effect on anyone on the other side; she looks at him expectantly, until he rolls his eyes and shakes his head abruptly.

"Damn you," she whispers in her soft voice. "Get you here." 

Even with the muzzle she can see his face is twisted with bitterness, and a touch of confusion. Why does she push him? Does she not know his crimes? Is she unaware of his true heritage?

"I said, come here, you frostborn whoreson."

No, no she is not unaware. The pools of her eyes turn to ice, a much more Sigyn-like element, and the sudden cold anger there comforts him a little. He hates it when maids weep. One of the reasons he grew to be so fond of Sigyn and Sif was how rarely they cry: rarely, if ever - he remembers Sif sustaining all manner of agonising injuries over the years and barely breaking into a sweat, never mind into tears.

It's much easier to deal with rage, but even that seems short-lived. Sigyn has regained her composure and watches him coolly, waiting.

Slowly Loki approaches her and lifts his own hands to place them over hers. A brief squeeze, nothing more, a reassurance that he might have lived and died a hundred times since the last time the two of them sat and talked as girl and prince, but he remembers her. Will always remember her.

She draws her hands away and departs after that, leaving a faint trace of honeysuckle perfume hanging in the darkness, and it is more than two years before he sees her again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So I was writing during the small hours again, and playing on the idea of the threefold goddess. I didn't want to make it too literal, especially since personally I think that the true number of her forms is incalculable. The theme is that she is in every woman, and she'd never turn her back on a son - even one as lost as Loki.
> 
> I have a lot of minor headcanons regarding Loki's childhood, and one of them is that he and Sigyn and Sif had a very unique friendship in which they would constantly bring out both the worst and the best in one another, helping shape who each grew up to be.
> 
> (It only goes in the Transformations 'verse because it fits into my AU canon rather than the actual canon.)
> 
> Title from Rilke's _Sonnets to Orpheus XXIX_.


	2. the warrior

She has never shied away from conflict, nor met a foe she could not face. In a career quite spectacularly stained with the blood of a thousand vanquished enemies, defeat has come only rarely, retreat rarer still. When they met, a score of mortal lifetimes ago, her bravery was the first thing he took note of. It overcame her awkwardness, transformed her into a hard, brutal and incomparably brilliant creature with a skeleton of steel and a tongue like a lashing whip. She burns so fiercely it hurts to look at her sometimes, eyes spilling fire and scouring through him like sand - he can still recall how it felt to be beneath her, to feel her fingertips brand his chest and carve her maker's mark into his reborn flesh. She had been responsible for his resurrection into a prince worth following, dragging him from his own anxieties even as he had encouraged her to break free. They were bound (inextricably so) yet still he would wonder how anyone, even Thor, could meet her gaze or touch her skin so freely, without their own skin charring and blackening from her inner luminosity. Even Sigyn had admitted her beautiful, in an alien sort of way.

She is predictably wrathful, the first night she comes to him. At first he assumes she is here of her own volition to flog him with her words and make his incarceration just that much more painful, but he soon learns that she, Sif, the walking conflict of interest, has been assigned to watch over him at night. Politely, he enquires if this is the king's idea of a joke.

She is a captain of the Einherjar now, she tells him. If it is a joke, he is asking the wrong person.

After that they fall into silence, only now, with his mind still running over into discord and sour melancholy, the quiet soon becomes unbearable. He waits for her to leave, counts an hour 'til he is certain she must be sleeping now, and slips into her dreams.

She doesn't take kindly to that. The rage she has kept so well-restrained, employed all her discipline to master, boils up, erupts and splits her open from the inside out - and with it, the floodgates are opened. He sees the cavernous depth of ossified sorrow within her, how with each passing day she has frozen a little more. He sees the fury at his betrayal and that ever-present sense of protectiveness towards Thor. Thor, who hurts more deeply than any of them because he does not understand how Loki can feel this way.

He will understand one day, though: one day it will come to him, all the fragments of moments throughout their long history in which Loki was indeed put down, pushed aside. On that day not even the queen could comfort him.

It's that knowledge that fires Sif's wrath, more than her own grievances or his remorseless smirk as she berates him. She had thought that in confronting him she might hasten the healing process between them. The swiftest way to dispatch a foe is by facing the challenge it presents, not by shying from it, and is not her greatest affinity for combat? She is war and she is desperate, and this confrontation is necessary.

Healing will come, but not before a long and bloody battle is waged between them - waged on opposite sides of the gaol bars, in his own chambers and in the house in Thruðvang, beneath the crystalline cliffs of Jötunnheimr and the shimmering Asgardian sun, until she has no more sorrow to expel for him and he no more bitterness to wield against her. It will come, as follows all wars, but not yet.

Tonight, and for a thousand nights to come, the fire still rages and the warrior's wrath is unabated.


	3. the mother

She hates that they must keep him confined, though she understands it and does not voice her thoughts. No mother would wish to see her son held captive.

But then, Loki is not a captive; he is a convict. He has crimes innumerable for which he must atone, and if he will not do so of his own volition then he will remain in Asgard's gaol for as long as the Allfather sees fit - and if that's to be forever, then Frigg understands that too. His resolute silence, when his brother first brings him home and for many weeks after his incarceration, gives her little hope that he'll ever reform but he must, she knows he must. She's seen it, seen a thousand apologies flung back and forth, promises made and kept and broken and scorned until the very word 'promise' rings hollow across all Asgard like a shadow-bell, an artificial sound. She's used to Loki's lies. Ofttimes she can tell from the merest flicker of his gaze where the truth may really be found. Well...she could. But that was a long time ago, and she's lucky if he'll even look at her now.

She wonders what she'd see, if he would meet her eyes. Hatred? She's done nothing to earn it, has she? Perhaps she never made it clear enough; perhaps she was never vocal enough in her love. Shame? Maybe, stars willing, the scant trace of remorse?

Doubtful. Yet she may hope.

\- My sons have always been the greatest delights of my life. Each with a smile that could split the deepest darkness; each as different as one world from another. I loved you no less, my clever, sweet child, that I was not the one to bear you; indeed there were times when I would even forget it. You would sit with me and curl yourself upon my knee and I would sing to you, and in those moments you and I were as much child and mother as I ever was with my own Balder. But Balder never broke my heart save with his passing, and of late it is all you seem to wish for.

One night, close to midsummer, the Queen of Asgard may be seen crossing the citadel's open courtyard after dark, descending a short flight of steps to a door of sturdy oak set in the wall below the armoury. Silent as a shadow she glides through the guardroom, each of the three stationed there dipping their heads to their lady. They exchange inscrutable glances as she passes through another door, this one of iron bars, and vanishes down a longer staircase, spiraling into the earth. Asgard's gaol is small, suited for its purpose and little else, and closely guarded by more than just men. One may not, once escorted in, simply walk out again.

It pulls at her ribs, that fact, digging its aching self into her chest until Frigg must pause at the last and put a hand to her heart, press gently at her own flesh as if her healing touch might ease the pain of her reluctant knowledge - her own admission that her son, her beautiful boy, has come home to her in chains, and the irrefutable truth of it awaits her now in the darkness.

\- Do you even realise it? Has your mind become so befouled, so warped that you see not the harm you wreak? Or is it your intention? My son - mine, and you are, Loki, you ever are and ever have been - you cloak yourself in black shadow now and hide from me. But I see all.

\- Loki, my clever, sweet child...what a man you have become.

For all it was another woman, a woman born in the oil-slick wastes of frozen Jötunnheimr and raised in those feral wilds, carried Loki before his birth, and Frigg never felt the pressing of his feet and hands in her womb as she had done with Balder, as she descends down and down into the gaol to where Loki is kept and confined beneath the citadel he is the greatest weight her soul has ever known. She approaches now, wondering if they've removed the muzzle as she'd ordered. There had been no need for it to remain, she'd argued when her husband had questioned the sense of her command: who would hear his poisons, should he choose to unleash them? He has guards, but neither are inclined to corruption. Sif was chosen for that reason: in her hands, a conflict of interest becomes a powerful motive to maintain the same level of professionalism she's given her entire life as in Einherji. The need to prove her own worth dominates all, even after hundreds of years, and she'd keep Loki in his cell with her bare hands just to prove how incorruptible she truly is. To herself, that is. Frigg knows that Sif need prove nothing to anyone else. Least of all Loki.

\- You smiled more, when you were young. True smiles, not these sour grimaces and scornful smirks that greet all I say tonight. They suit you ill. There was a time when you were knee-high to a foal and your smile was the most beautiful thing; and I thought there was no sweeter sight than you and your brothers, laughing together.

_Why do you tell me this?_

She is a queen, and stands by her king as her wisdom allows. But she is mother to princes and monsters both, and here at least wisdom departs, leaving her unable or unwilling to distinguish between the two.

 _Why do you linger here, woman?_

She lifts her head, fixes a cold blue stare upon her son. She cannot hold the frost for long, though, and her gaze swiftly thaws.

\- I linger because I hope, child.

_And are you a fool? There is naught to hope for, down here. It is a fool's province._

\- Hush, Loki. You cannot vilify hope, any more than you can the air you breathe and the water you sip.

He needs them all in equal measure: despair runs in his lifeblood but Frigg would see it drawn like venom from the wound - the great, festering scar tissue at the core of him, the infected heart of their family.

_I may do what I wish, and I say your hope is folly._

Frigg returns to her chambers before long, leaves him to the darkness and frustrations that gnaw at them both and will do so for many months to come.

The prince is bitter and the queen is weary; the son is angry yet still...

...yet still the mother hopes.


	4. the queen

_Hel's lady speaks..._

I am my father's daughter, as I have been since that long-ago day when it was decided that parentless Death ought be the spawn of Asgard's Lucifer, who had already give the realms so many fearsome sons and daughters. I am no blood of his, but the Queen of Hel cannot birth herself, so the reformers thought; and is Hel not a pagan Hell?

No, of course it is not - my domain exists, for one thing - but few can reconcile the differences now and I do not care to correct them. They will learn their error, come the day they pass my gates.

I have oft wondered what the man they called my father thought, to be compared so to a fallen spirit of their mighty, distant deity. He is fallen, and fallen again, yet I doubt he considers himself that way - the deeds of his long life are of a noble kind of evil, a persistent devotion to the cause of chaos and though the Æsir may not perceive it so, a kind of transcendence beyond the constraints of morality.

And I, a shadow of a girl-child and a poor substitute for a loving daughter, reap as he sows, draw souls through my doors even as he sends them from the higher realms. A sweet partnership, the closest we will come, I think, to filial bonding.

But we have more in common than that; more than our inescapable penchant for warrior lovers too. He has - or had, I rather suspect, after this latest strike into darkness - his glory-bound swordsmistress, I my fallen hero. Once or twice, when the particulars of the god's crimes reach mine ears, I've thought of meeting this woman who stirs such an unlikely song in a frost giant's blood. Thought only, of course: I know our paths lead us ever apart and never the twain shall collide. Sif (poorly-named, I think, for a hard-blooded war god such as she) is destined for the warm embrace of roaring Valhöl; my land's cold shall not touch her bones where iron and black steel reach first.

In the end, I care not. One thing will outlive all else, and I alone know it. I am Queen of Death, and to be so is to rule the one thing that will never fall.

They called my placement here a punishment, but truly the Allfather gifted me a great thing when he gave me command of the single certain thing in all the cosmos. My walls will never crumble, my legions never fall, and they still think me _poor Hela._

But truly, I am my father's daughter. I would sooner rule in Helheimr than bend the knee to old One-Eye as so many others chose: power is power, and my fingers spill over with it. In the cessation of all things it is to me they will come, as all things must.

I am the end, as I was at the beginning. I am the man who is not my father and I am my motherless half-self. I am all the souls who pass my gates, and I am no man's to claim.

But what kind of daughter would I be, if I let the liesmith rot alone in his warded gaol cell?

I form myself a voice from shadow and I shape myself hands from the night to reach old Loki in his nightmares. He never held me as a child, never thought of me as his daughter or indeed as anything other than an occasional ally of convenience. Yet nor has he ever looked upon me with the disgust I saw in the Allfather's eye, and I remember it when I grip his fingers and give him a dreamless sleep.

He'll need it, with the horrors that have been, and are to come.

**Author's Note:**

> Sooooo I was writing during the small hours again. The Goddess is in every woman, and she'd never turn her back on a son - even one as lost as Loki.
> 
> I have a lot of minor headcanons regarding Loki's childhood, and one of them is that he and Sigyn and Sif had a very unique friendship in which they would constantly bring out both the worst and the best in one another, helping shape who each grew up to be.


End file.
